A five-minute neck scan may help predict a person’s risk of developing dementia 10 years before symptoms emerge.

Scott Chiesa, from University College London, and colleagues said that the test, which analyzes the pulse of blood vessels in the neck, could one day be used to test for cognitive decline.

In 2002, the researchers used ultrasound scanner to take a closer look at the blood vessels in the neck of more than 3,000 individuals and then monitored their memory and problem solving ability over the next 15 years.

They found that those with the highest intensity pulse at the start of the study were about 50 percent more likely to experience accelerated cognitive decline over the next decade compared with the other participants.

Chiesa and colleagues said that this is equal to about an extra one to one and a half years of cognitive decline.

]]>Nintendo Wii To End Support For Netflix, Other Video Streaming Services After January 30https://images.inquisitr.com/5159244/nintendo-wii-netflix-video-streaming-services/
Mon, 12 Nov 2018 13:16:33 +0000https://www.inquisitr.com/?p=5159244

Here’s some bad news for those who still exclusively stream videos on their Nintendo Wii: You may have to find an alternative soon if you want to continue binge-watching your favorite Netflix shows.

According to The Verge, Netflix has informed its users that Nintendo will be shutting down all video streaming services for the console after January 30, 2019. This means that you only have until the end of January next year to watch Stranger Things and other Netflix videos on Wii.

“Wii is no longer supported,” Netflix announced. “Nintendo will suspend all video streaming services on Wii – including the Netflix Channel – after January 30, 2019.”

The Netflix notification said that Nintendo will suspend all streaming services for the device. This could mean that Wii owners may also no longer be able to stream Amazon Prime and Hulu videos on their console by next year.

Former Facebook top executive Palmer Luckey may have been ousted from the social media company over his support for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Luckey, who co-founded the virtual reality company Oculus, has told people that he was fired for supporting Trump before the presidential election.

In September 2016, Luckey made a quiet $10,000 donation to Nimble America, an unofficial Donald Trump group that circulated internet memes that malign Hillary Clinton, but news about his support eventually got out and reportedly drew backlash within Facebook.

Later that month, Luckey made a public post on Facebook, saying that he contributed to the organization thinking it had fresh ideas for communicating with young voters. He also said that he plans to vote Gary Johnson, who was the Libertarian nominee in that election.

Former Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz is reportedly assembling an elite public relations team as he prepares to release his new book From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, and considers running for president of the United States.

According to CNBC, Shultz’s team includes Steve Schmidt, who managed Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008.

Shultz is one of those being considered as a potential candidate to take on President Donald Trump in two years. Schmidt, the former vice chairman of public relations powerhouse Edelman, appears as the best person to help with a Schultz presidential campaign as Schultz’s experience is mainly in business and not in the political arena.

Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair, which the late theoretical physicist used in the 1980s and 1990s, exceeded sale expectations at an online auction held on Thursday.

The value of the chair was earlier estimated to be up to $19,500 (£15,000), but it eventually sold for $387,480 (£296,750), CNN reported. The amount is nearly 20 times more than its pre-sale estimate.

It also sold for more than the amount fetched by the manuscripts of other renowned scientists.

Hawking used the wheelchair after he was paralyzed with the degenerative nerve disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“Hawking initially resisted the idea of using a wheelchair in the late 1960s; by the late 1970s, he was using motorized models like the present example, and was even renowned for being a rather wild driver,” auctioneer Christie’s said in a statement prior to the auction.

The Australian police on Sunday arrested and filed charges against a 50-year-old woman who contaminated strawberries with needles.

According to ABC News, the suspect is farm worker My Ut Trinh. She faces seven counts of contamination of goods.

Strawberries spiked with needles were first reported in Queensland, the third most populous state in Australia, on September 8 after a man, who consumed one of the contaminated berries was rushed to the hospital for severe abdominal pains.

The victim’s friend said that they also found another sewing needle lodged inside other strawberries after the incident. Reports of other needle-filled strawberries from other Australian states also emerged.

Authorities announced the safety risk on September 12.

Police warned people to slice the fruit before eating and Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk offered a AUD$ 100,000 reward for information that could lead to the arrest of those responsible for deliberately putting needles in strawberries.

A new report has revealed that before journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi was killed, Saudi officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed a plot to kill the kingdom’s enemies.

The crown prince is believed to have ordered the operation that led to the killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey last month.

Now, a report published by the New York Times on Sunday claims that in 2017, a year before Khashoggi was allegedly killed by a team of Saudi agents, Saudi officials asked a group of businessmen about using private companies to assassinate Iranian enemies.

Citing three people familiar with the talks, the report said that the officials made the inquiry when the crown prince ordered his advisers to ramp up military and intelligence operations abroad.

Prior to admitting that Khashoggi was slain in a premeditated attack, Saudi officials claimed that the Washington Post columnist was killed in a rogue operation ordered by Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri.

An Oklahoma jury has ordered health insurer Aetna to pay the family of a cancer patient it denied coverage before she died.

According to CBS News, the jury on Monday instructed Aetna to pay the family of Orrana Cunningham $25.5 million for denying her coverage claim for a type of radiation therapy a year before she died.

The jury found that Aetna doctors did not spend enough time to review Cunningham’s case before she was denied coverage for proton beam therapy, a targeted form of radiation that Cunningham’s doctor wanted her to receive to pinpoint her tumor sans the risk of blindness and the other side effects of standard radiation.

The jury ruled that the health insurer recklessly disregarded its duty to deal fairly and in good faith with Cunningham who was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer.

An Aetna doctor who denied Cunningham coverage for the therapy cited that the treatment is experimental. Two other in-house doctors who reviewed the case also upheld the decision.

Use of social media can increase depression and loneliness, findings of an experiment conducted by psychology experts have shown.

Social media and increased risk for depression and loneliness have long been linked but no causal association has been proven until now.

In a new study, however, psychologist Melissa Hunt, from the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues finally connect the use of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to decreased well-being.

Hunt and colleagues involved 143 participants to take part in an experiment designed to test the psychological effects of allowing people to use social media as they usually did compared to limiting their use of these sites to a maximum of ten minutes per platform per day.

The researchers randomly assigned the participants into one of two groups who either used social media as usual or had their social media usage limited.

The sites involved in the study were Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, the three most popular social media sites among college students.

A yellow, black, and white bird spotted in a backyard in Pennsylvania earlier this year turned out to be a hybrid of three different species.

When bird watcher Lowell Burket saw the male bird in the borough of Roaring Spring in May, he noticed that it had the physical attributes of the blue-winged warbler and the golden-winged warbler, the Huffington Post reported. The bird, however, sang like a third species, the chestnut-sided warbler.

After taking photos and videos of the bird, Burket contacted the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Lab at Cornell. The lab fortunately took notice of his email and researcher David Toews got in touch with him

The two took blood samples and measurements of the bird when they found it again. DNA analysis now reveals that Burket’s suspicion about the bird was right.

It is three species in one. The bird’s mother was a hybrid between blue-winged warbler and golden-winged warbler, while the father was a chestnut-sided warbler.

Many people take nutritional supplements such as fish oil and Vitamin D to prevent deadly diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

Findings of a government-funded study, however, have provided evidence that these supplements may not actually help in staving off these diseases.

The new study, which was presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago and published in the New England Journal of Medicine involved nearly 26,000 adults who were at least 50-years-old without any history of cancer, heart attack, stroke, and other forms of heart disease.

Chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital JoAnn Manson and colleagues randomly assigned the participants to take a daily dose of vitamin D, fish oil containing omega-3, or placebo.

After more than five years, they found that there was no significant difference in rates of heart disease and cancer between those who take supplements and those who take a placebo.

Facebook has released a new app that essentially cloned another popular app that allows users to create fun and short videos.

The new app called Lasso is reportedly designed to be the competitor of Tiktok, the viral 15-second video app that recently merged with Musical.ly.

According to The Verge, Lasso is Facebook’s new attempt to win over teens who are losing interest on its social network.

This year, only half of teens claim that they use Facebook. In 2014, 71 percent of those in this age group did. The most recent data from Pew Research show that YouTube is now the most preferred platform of choice for teens, followed by Instagram and Snapchat.

TechCrunch leaked about the creation of the Lasso app two weeks ago. It reported that the app was designed to be a standalone competitor to Musical.ly, which became a hit with teens and preteens before it was acquired by ByteDance and merged with the company’s TikTok app.

Researchers have created a bionic mushroom that may one day help light up our homes.

In a new study published in the journal Nano Letters on Wednesday, researchers reported how they created a mushroom that can produce its own electricity. Study researcher Manu Mannoor, from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and colleagues created the electricity-generating mushrooms by integrating cyanobacteria capable of producing electricity with nanoscale materials that can collect the current.

Like plants, cyanobacteria, bacteria with blue-green color, can create their own energy through photosynthesis. The researchers said that the microbes are known in the bioengineering community as capable of creating electricity. Unfortunately, cyanobacteria do not last long because the artificial surfaces that are used to host them cannot keep the bacteria thriving long enough. In the new study, the researchers reported that they found properties within the mushroom that allow the bacteria to survive longer while generating electricity.

The exact cause of autism is still unknown, but researchers have linked the condition to genetic and environmental factors, which includes zinc deficiency.

While it is not yet clear if zinc deficiency indeed contributes to autism, researchers of a new study published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience defined a possible mechanism on how this could work.

Sally Kim, from Stanford University School of Medicine, and colleagues, demonstrated that zinc can shape the connections between brain cells that form during early development through a complex molecular machinery controlled by genes linked to autism.

Kim and colleagues found that when a brain signal is transferred via these connections known as synapses, zinc enters the target brain cells where it could bind the two proteins called SHANK2 and SHANK3 that cause changes in the composition and function of adjacent signal receptors known as AMPARs on the neuron’s surface at the synapse.

Mail bombing suspect Cesar Sayoc faces life in prison after a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted him on 30 charges, according to NBC News.

The 56-year-old was indicted on Friday, November 9, with mailing pipe bombs to several public figures who have been critical of President Donald Trump. These include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, billionaire George Soros, former CIA director John Brennan, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and actor Robert De Niro. Sayoc also allegedly mailed an improvised explosive device to CNN.

The charges, which carry a maximum of life in prison, include the use of weapons of mass destruction, illegal mailing of explosives, interstate transportation of explosives, and threatening interstate communications.

Sex addiction may be more common than previously thought. Findings of a new research suggest that up to 8 percent of Americans struggle to control their sexual urges.

Janna Dickenson of the University of Minnesota and colleagues said that 10 percent of men and 7 percent of women claim to have significant levels of stress and dysfunctions linked to their sexual thoughts or behaviors.

In their new study, which was published in the JAMA Network Open on Friday, November 9, Dickenson and colleagues looked at the data of more than 2,300 adults between 18- and 50-years-old from all 50 U.S states who participated in the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.

The researchers then rated the participants’ distress and impairment associated with difficulty controlling sexual urges, feelings and behaviors using a scale known as the Compulsive Sexual Behavior Inventory, or CSBI.

A score of at least 35 on a scale of 0 to 65 indicated clinically relevant levels of distress and/or impairment.

Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was killed in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey last month, may have lost his life after disclosing the funding source of an anti-Iran TV channel based in the United Kingdom, according to PressTV.

Following a terrorist attack in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, Iran International TV gave airtime to the spokesperson for the extremist separatist group that claimed responsibility for the attack.

Yacoub Hor al-Tostari praised the attack that killed at least two dozen people.

In a report published on Oct. 2, The Guardian cited a source close to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for claiming that the TV network based in Chiswick, west London received $250 million, or around £192 million, from the Saudi royal court per year.

“Iran International is one of an increasing number of London-based television stations backed by Middle Eastern interests that are trying to influence audiences thousands of miles away,” Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian‘s Iran correspondent, wrote in the report.

China’s state-run press agency Xinhua has introduced a new anchor to deliver news, but unlike the typical newsreaders that people are used to seeing on TV or on the internet, this one is based on artificial intelligence technology.

The anchor is based on digital composites created from footage of human hosts and designed to read text fed into the artificial intelligence using a synthesized voice.

The South China Morning Post reported that Xinhua created two anchors, one to broadcast news in English and the other for Chinese. The news agency developed these in collaboration with the search engine company Sogou.

According to The Verge, old videos of human anchors were used as a base layer for the AI anchors. By animating parts of the face and mouth and combining this with a synthesized voice, Xinhua can program the digital anchors to read the news far quicker than if they use traditional CGI.

The AI-based news anchors reportedly learn from live broadcasting by themselves.